The Internet provides access to a wide variety of content. For instance, images, audio, video, and web pages for many different topics are accessible through the Internet. The accessible content provides an opportunity to present advertisements to users. Advertisements can be placed within content, such as a web page, image or video, or the content can trigger the display of one or more advertisements, such as presenting an advertisement in an advertisement slot within the content and/or in an advertisement slot of a pop-up window or other overlay.
Advertisers can decide to target their ads within particular types of content (e.g., web sites of a particular genre) using various advertising management, or analytics, tools. These tools also allow an advertiser to track the performance of various advertisements (ads or ad groups) or advertising campaigns (ad campaigns). The ad criteria parameters used to determine when to display a particular ad can also be changed using advertising management tools.
The data that is used to generate the performance measures of ads for the advertiser may include a combination of data from multiple servers. In some cases, the combined data is large enough that performance measures generated from the data may be needed to provide an efficient way of understanding the data. The data, therefore, may be processed. Processing of the data to generate useful and accurate performance measures involves a number of obstacles.